Memories are made of this-defining moments

As a child summers run forever. There feels a constancy and certainty there that the people you love will be there forever riding you high on their shoulders. You are certain they will never let you fall; even if it feels a bit wobbly up there at times!

Whenever I walk in city streets and see or hear someone playing an accordian I think of you. I don't cry now, lots of love, blood, loss and thunder struck my lifes bridge since then but instead feel so very proud.

You busked at weddings as well, I am told now, in the streets, whenever you weren't working as a telephonist in Chelmsford. In my minds eye, you gave me sight when you had none, you commuted from Harold Wood Station. I see you tapping away with your thing long white stick and disappearing out of view from Swindon Close to Redreuth Road.

Apparently, I was later told, you knew the number of each bus by the sound of then engine; how you knew this I just don't know!

You sang, you whistled, you laughed. Sometimes you got merry at the pub. You were never abusive or cruel to us, that was to be another experience from another blind man we were yet to meet after you were whipped away into the star-dust.

You seemed all powerful, strong, knowing rarely telling us off.

Whenever I walk through the London underground. Whenever I climb the irregular steps or place my feet on the escalator that descends or ascends with its own frightening constancy I think of you and wonder. Just as I think of you and wonder as I wait for the grimy noisy but still wonderful rocket that emerges from an unknown blackness and stillness I think of you. I wonder to as the doors smoothly open and anonymous folk drop out like peas; each with a dream and purpose of their own in our precious world called life. I think of you!
I have been told that you wereonce accidentally pushed onto the underground tracks, in the path of a train, by the swell of bodies in another time. Somehow you managed to leap back onto the platform; a whisper away from death that still waited for the time to claim you.

I am something of a woose myself so I am certain that I would not have had the same courage and tenacity as you but would have stayed well inside my own familiar comfort zone.

I would say our lives back then, before the heartbreak came, were both ordinary as well as extraordinary.
We went to Southend and played on the stony beach, wincing and giggling as our tiny toes slid over the jagged stones but we didn't care. The sea was in front of us and our mum and dad were there behing us aware; even though they couldn't see us-they could hear us couldn't they!

We rode the train that ran the full length of the pier then. We ate fish and chips out of newspaper; no health and saftey rubbish to stop us then!
We ate candyfloss and then tottered,fell or sat on the roud-about until we felt or were sick but it didn't matter for we were simply just happy then. We were just ordinary kids leading ordinary lives; thankfully not knowing what was round the corner then.